Quote: Darwin on the tree of life
Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, introduced the idea that the relationships between organisms form a tree.
All posts tagged with phylogeny
Dinosaur phylogeny woes
This is a nice write-up by Laura Geggel of a current exchange of comments in Nature about dinosaur phylogeny: “Dino Family Tree Overturned? Not Quite, But Ch...
Arguing about species: Is it evidence, or ego?
For some people who follow human evolution news, recognizing “species” is really just about whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Many people assume that th...
Link: The problem with ‘basal’ in phylogenetic trees
Stacey Smith summarizes the problems with using the term “basal” when discussing phylogenetic positions of organisms: “The ancestors are not among us”.
Short-faced bear convergence and the diversity of American extinct bears
A neat new paper by Kieren Mitchell and colleagues in Biology Letters has an mtDNA phylogeny for some extinct bears of the Americas. The main conclusion is t...
Link: The phylogeny of our plant foods
The Botanist in the Kitchen takes a look at the phylogenetic relationships among some of the major plant foods in Western diets: “The Food Plant Tree of Life...
Herpes simplex virus 2 may have invaded ancient humans from chimpanzees
Did Homo erectus get herpes from chimps?
What do we know about early hominin relationships?
Ten years ago I published a paper on the failure of cladistics to resolve questions of early hominin relationships. My study used computer simulation to prod...
Leakey, Tobias and Napier on the definition of our genus
Leakey, Tobias and Napier (1964) defined the species, Homo habilis. A simple species diagnosis was not enough: Leakey and colleagues had to argue for an expa...
Laboratory inquiry 1: Reconstructing ancestral primates
Note: This page will change, as your inquiry assignment progresses. Keep checking back here.
Darwin's primate phylogeny
I’m doing some reading and ran across a 2009 post by Brian Switek (“Darwin, Ardi and the African apes”), who touched on a little-appreciated aspect of Darwin...
Polytypism and complexity
Adam Van Arsdale considers whether a “bushy”, speciose phylogeny is actually evidence of evolutionary “complexity”: “Linearity and simplicity in the fossil r...
Mailbag: The hominins of our discontent
Re: “Taxonomy on tap”, where I reminded readers about my lack of a principled reason to continue using “hominid” instead of “hominin”.
Anthropology 105, lecture 7: Eyes
Out of all the lectures in the course, this was one of my favorites to put together. I return to the topic of evolutionary developmental biology, first raise...
Primate classification and phylogeny
Our relationship to other kinds of primates is in part reflected by the pattern of similarities and differences we share with them. This pattern of similarit...
The homoplastic apes
Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison have published a review paper in NatureWood:Harrison:2011, arguing that the extent of anatomical convergence among Miocene ap...
Sloth bombers
Brian Switek notes a new study on the locomotor dynamics of sloths. I perked up when reading this passage…
Quote: Higher-level taxa
I ran across this passage in a book chapter by D. Tab Rasmussen, covering early catarrhine evolution. I think it captures an important point about the fossil...
Weidenreich on species
Franz Weidenreich, in his 1945 article, “The Puzzle of Pithecanthropus”:
Coincidence or homology?
Remember that story from last month about how fruit flies have some kind of free will because they navigate their flight in nondeterministic directions?
Genetic discord
I ran across this paper from a few years ago by John Avise and DeEtte Walker, which considers the implication of reticulation-based species concepts for mt...
Our quondam homs
Did I miss a meeting?
PhyloCode and human evolution
The April issue of Discover has a feature article on PhyloCode, focusing on the roles of Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in trying to revise the code ...
Homology and homoplasy :: features and relationships
To test phylogenetic hypotheses, scientists must be able to find out which similarities indicate a close relationship between species and which do not. The ...
Speciation
Speciation is the cessation of interbreeding between one animal population and all other populations with which it formerly exchanged genes. When interbreed...
Species concepts
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...
Phylogenies
Defining and identifying species is one major area of research into the evolutionary process. Equally important is the study of how different species are re...
Relationships among the hominoids :: overview
Evolutionary relationships among the living apes and humans were difficult to determine when paleontologists had only their morphology to compare them. Darw...